intridea.com Archives - 05 July 2013, Friday

One of the biggest challenges for any marketer is to create content that is relevant to their target market. Because content is the basis of all marketing today, getting it right is very important. Have the wrong content, and you repel the people you're trying to attract. But have the...

Recently, I deployed a client project to Heroku, using the Heroku instance as an internal demo server. The project is based on Ruby 2.0 and Rails 4. I was surprised to find that the deployment to Heroku is not as smooth as it was before. Here are the tricks and tips I learned to help ...

Sometimes you want to write a batch of utility methods that can be accessed from a module for example Utility.parse_something(string) or any number of useful little tools for your application. Here’s a very clean-looking way to achieve it: module Utilities extend self def parse_someth...

Creating requirements for your web or mobile application can be tedious; managing ideas even moreso. The larger the project, the more difficult it becomes. Add in the flexibility that agile brings to projects, and things can quickly get out of hand. But what if there was a way to make...

Andy has been working on web application development since 2005. From year 2008, he started to be a pure Ruby/Rails engineer. After joined in Intridea in 2011, he became an experienced web system maker with full stack of knowledge including both frontend and backend technologies. Andy...

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A dedicated user experience developer with nearly a decade of experience building complex web applications, Mike has worked with startups, colleges and design agencies, always with a focus on creating quality interactive experiences. Mike is a proud alumni of the University of Arizona...

You have to start somewhere. We're excited to hear what co-founder Chris Selmer learns at Google I/O , but until then let's jump right in with a basic "Hello World" example. To deploy this example you'll need access to the Mirror API Developer Preview. If you have access, go to the Go...

When it comes to selling products on a local basis, mobile rules the day. Whenever I travel anywhere, the first thing I do is fire up the Yelp or Google Maps apps to find someplace to eat. Next I check out the websites of those places. If I like what I see, I've found my next meal; if...

Less than five years ago, two young entrepreneurs named Ben Bixby and Greg O'Keeffe came to Intridea with an ambitious goal: launching a platform for helping homeowners track and reduce their energy consumption. It was a great idea, but we needed to work fast to have it done by their ...

Go ahead and reach in your pocket. What's there? I'm willing to bet you've got a smartphone in your hand right now. And if I was even more of a betting man, I might wager that either you or someone at home also has a tablet of some sort. The rise of mobile has been well documented. In...

We were very happy to sponsor Day of Fosterly 2013 , which happened this past weekend. More than 600 attendees showed up, and you could feel the energy in the Artisphere. Congrats to Adam Zuckerman and the entire foster.ly team that made the weekend a great success. A special shoutout...

Starting at 10 AM on Saturday, May 4th (2013), hundreds of entrepreneurs will gather at Artisphere for more than eight hours of panels, workshops, chats, demos, expo, job fair and more at Day of Foster.ly 2013 . If you're interested in starting, growing, or exiting a company, this con...

Ben Markowitz has always loved being creative, even from a young age. From working with pencil and paper, to Legos, and then on to his first computer, an Apple IIgs he was always exploring new ways to draw out his vision and create interesting designs. Ben attended James Madison Unive...

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Get Involved. This is the obvious first step: participation. Start building a presence on the mailing list, bug tracker or other community resources for your favorite open source projects. Respect the Gift. Remember that even when an open source library is causing you frustration that...

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This past weekend I participated in Hack the Midwest , a Kansas City hackathon. The event was a huge success drawing a crowd of around 100 developers. As one of the visiting developer evangelists said, it was a great turnout for a New York hackathon, much less one in the midwest. At t...

The iPad has arrived, so let the design fun commence! Featured here is an iPad wallpaper template in Photoshop (PSD) format (download ), allowing you to easily create & test your new background creations with minimal layer nightmares. The PSD is setup to let you view a single wallpape...

Thanks to 37signals and the Re-Wired Group for hosting the Switch Workshop in Chicago last week. Jason, Bob, and Chris introduced us to the Jobs-to-be-Done framework and explored what makes us buy the products and services we buy. Buyers always switch from one product to another. For ...

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Ben Markowitz has always loved being creative, even from a young age. From working with pencil and paper, to Legos, and then on to his first computer, an Apple IIgs he was always exploring new ways to draw out his vision and create interesting designs. Ben attended James Madison Unive...

Related:

Thanks to 37signals and the Re-Wired Group for hosting the Switch Workshop in Chicago last week. Jason, Bob, and Chris introduced us to the Jobs-to-be-Done framework and explored what makes us buy the products and services we buy. Buyers always switch from one product to another. For ...

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Calling Methods on Potential Nil Objects in Rails By Raymond Law November 2, 2010 in rails Rails adds a pretty cool Object#try method. From Rails doc: try(method, *args, &block) This Invokes the method identified by the symbol method, passing it any arguments and/or the block specifie...

Anthony is a forward-thinking, charismatic professional who loves technology and working with software teams who are building collaborative, cutting edge and disruptive web, mobile and desktop-based software focused on enabling, empowering and encouraging people to engage software tec...

Anthony is a forward-thinking, charismatic professional who loves technology and working with software teams who are building collaborative, cutting edge and disruptive web, mobile and desktop-based software focused on enabling, empowering and encouraging people to engage software tec...

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Anthony is a forward-thinking, charismatic professional who loves technology and working with software teams who are building collaborative, cutting edge and disruptive web, mobile and desktop-based software focused on enabling, empowering and encouraging people to engage software tec...

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Anthony is a forward-thinking, charismatic professional who loves technology and working with software teams who are building collaborative, cutting edge and disruptive web, mobile and desktop-based software focused on enabling, empowering and encouraging people to engage software tec...

Anthony is a forward-thinking, charismatic professional who loves technology and working with software teams who are building collaborative, cutting edge and disruptive web, mobile and desktop-based software focused on enabling, empowering and encouraging people to engage software tec...

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I always love traveling to DC. Meeting up with fellow Intrideans is incredibly motivating and satisfying. I had this chance yet again over the last couple days for an event; Open Analytics Summit , whereby Intridea was a sponsor. As well, we had a speaking slot. A few other companies ...

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Lessons Learned: Natively Compiling Tidy HTML for Heroku By Michael Bleigh May 2, 2012 in heroku , compiling , tidy , vulcan Recently I was working on a project and wanted to be able to utilize Tidy to clean up some HTML output. I added the tidy_ffi gem to my project and voila, it wor...

Ben Markowitz has always loved being creative, even from a young age. From working with pencil and paper, to Legos, and then on to his first computer, an Apple IIgs he was always exploring new ways to draw out his vision and create interesting designs. Ben attended James Madison Unive...

Marc is a MITX award-winning solutions architect. Prior to joining Intridea, Marc was Vice President of Interactive Development at Bridgeline Digital. Marc has developed web solutions for the National Children's Museum, the Washington Redskins, Hooked on Phonics, and Congressional Qua...

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Marc is a MITX award-winning solutions architect. Prior to joining Intridea, Marc was Vice President of Interactive Development at Bridgeline Digital. Marc has developed web solutions for the National Children's Museum, the Washington Redskins, Hooked on Phonics, and Congressional Qua...